GR: I understand you had sex on one of the main stages at a Megadeth concert once.
O: It was actually at an event called LiveStock, in the Tampa, FL area. It was a really big weekend-long concert, with several bands and two stages. The main band the last night was Megadeth. Lance and I had backstage passes, and we had been up on the side stage filming a wet t-shirt contest just before Megadeth went on. We stayed up on the side stage while they played, and we played too. We were actually able to snap a few pics of me, bent over on the stage watching the show to my left, and Lance doing me from behind. While about 10,000 people were in the audience in front of us!
GR: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Your life before you opened the web site.
O: I grew up in Massachusetts. Lifeguarded for several years at the town pool, the beach, and summer camp. Graduated 4th in my class & went to college in New Orleans. I was pre-med, but after working as a surgery tech at the med school for three years, decided that I HATED all the doctors that I worked with and I ended up switching majors to English Lit with a concentration in Created Writing. I went back to MA after college, had a hard time finding a job and ended up writing for a construction sales newsletter. Didn't like that so much, so I saved $1,000 and took off for San Francisco. By the time I got there I had no money and nowhere to live, so I took a job nannying. Also took a couple graduate writing classes at Berkeley. On a trip back east for Christmas, I met Lance & six months later decided to move back to the east coast (he was in VA by then) to live with him. Found a job doing PR for a major cable television channel and it was while living and working there that we started up the website.
GR: For the sake of anyone who may not be familiar with your site, how did you get started?
O: Lance had been in several swinging relationships before I met him, and he introduced it to me slowly. The first time I ever took naked pictures was because I lost a bet about who an actress was in a movie. The first time I ever took naked sexual pictures was after a drunken evening with Lance – he had asked me about my sexual fantasies and I told him that I'd always thought about being blindfolded, tied up, and then "done" by a bunch of people – without knowing who they were, or even what sex they were. A few nights later, he set that up for me! He ended up video taping the session, and posted a few pics and video clips to a website that he was doing with some of his friends (he'd been doing online porn – in those days it was via a BBS – for a couple years before I met him). We got SO much feedback from those few pics and clips that we decided to start a site just for me.
GR. Did you ever think that the site would be so successful?
O: Nope. It was more or less just a lark, and a way to meet people for adult parties and fun. At the time, I was still working full-time, and NO ONE in my family or at work had any clue that I had this other side to me. I didn't have a whole lot to do with the site when we first started, other than being in the pictures and answering email. I never would have imagined that running the site would become my full-time job.
GR: How much does it cost to run everything?
O: That depends on what you want to include. We have to pay for our server every month, and our computers and photo/video equipment, DVD duplication, postage and credit card processing fees. We could keep it down to that, but then when you figure in travel, meeting up with people, party expenses, the costs rise pretty dramatically.
GR: How much does the site pull in?
O: Enough for us both to not have to work on anything else.
GR: Besides the obvious, what do you think the appeal is in your site?
O: I think the biggest thing we have going for us over other amateur websites is that we are totally accessible to our fans. I do live cam shows, I meet up with fans for photo shoots and just to hang out for a few beers. I invite guys from the site to our house for parties, and I travel around the country hosting parties near them. I don't hire models or actors for any of my shoots – I use the guys who are out there checking out my pictures. We are 100% homegrown, and invite fans to get in on the action too!
GR: It seems that even though the porn industry, as far as the huge corporations go, pulls in billions of dollars a year, they seem to fall short on the internet end of things, when going up against amateur sites like yours. Any idea why?
O: The big commercial porn sites still do really well … there's probably just a different customer base between them and the amateurs. Some guys like to see incomparable beauties airbrushed to perfection. Others like to see real women … who they just might happen to run into at the bar Tuesday night. If you're looking for real, amateur is the way to go. And the internet has really been the leading medium for finding real girls.
GR: What's a person's typical reaction to what you do for a living?
O: [Laughs] Actually, that's one of the reasons that we moved to Arizona. It seems that people out here still have a "wild west" attitude. In other words, they don't really give a rats ass what we do. Back East it was a whole different story … at one point we had our next door neighbors talking to everyone they could think of to try to get us kicked out of the neighborhood – the police, the town council, our landlord. Apparently we were too depraved to live next door to them. I really hate that attitude.
GR: What do you say to the ideology that porn is immoral, degrading towards women, etc. It seems to me that a lot of this business, from the web sites to the huge corporations, is run by women
O: I think there are cases when that is true, especially in commercial porn. Be it some of the story lines, or just a girl or two who really doesn't know what she's doing (because she's on drugs, or desperate or in some other bad situation) and gets taken advantage of. But that is going to happen in any walk of life. Desperate people are going to get taken advantage of, and even jokes around the corporate water cooler can in a lot of cases be called degrading towards women. I don't think in the porn industry that it is at all the norm. In fact, since I've started doing this I've found the entire industry very empowering for women, particularly in the amateur market. For instance, I do what (or who) I want to do, when and how I want to do it. I am in charge of how it is marketed and distributed. I'm in complete charge of the image that I want to project to the world. That is extremely empowering.
GR: I read somewhere that you have an actual video distribution deal in the works. Is that rare on the amateur end of things?
O: Yes, it is relatively rare for amateurs like me to get their DVDs distributed to brick & mortar shops. We worked really hard to find a distributor for our material.
GR: A fair portion of the material on your web site comes from New Orleans. Do you have a lot of friends in the area?
O: Not so much anymore, but a few still. None of the people I knew from school are still there, but we've hosted lots of parties and shoots in New Orleans, and still keep in touch with several of the people we've met there.
GR: Although this is addressed on the site, I have to ask, for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with your website, do you ever worry about diseases or pregnancy? I noticed that all of your work is done without condoms.
O: For any penetration, I do require recent HIV tests. I am not so much concerned about other STDs, because most of them are treatable. And I figure that the guys who'll go out and get tested are pretty responsible with their sexual habits to begin with. As far as pregnancy goes, there are a ton of birth control options out there, and I'm pretty confident with mine.
GR: Would children change things?
O: Yup, a bunch. We wouldn't be able to travel as often, and we wouldn't be inviting people off the Internet to our house for weekend parties. It'd make things a lot more difficult to plan. But, if we do have kids it'll still be several years from now, so I'll worry about it when the time comes. One thing is for sure, having kids wouldn't put an end to our lifestyle choices or to the website … we'd just have to be more circumspect in our planning. Right now, we are not the least bit discreet.
GR: Politics-wise, where do you believe you stand?
O: I used to be way to the left. A bleeding heart liberal and a card-carrying member of Amnesty International. As I've gotten older, it pains me to realize that I'm starting to endorse more conservative fiscal policies … of course, I have to pay a lot more in taxes now than I used to.
GR: Has the site changed your opinions on things at all?
O: I was adamantly against pornography… I thought it was extremely demeaning to women. I wouldn't watch a wet t-shirt contest, and I felt bad for the girls who showed their boobs at Mardi Gras. Just goes to show that you shouldn't make judgments until you actually know what you're talking about!
GR: I understand that you get more than your fair share of flakes. Guys who don't show up and so on. Do you deal with that a lot?
O: At any given event, about 1/3 of the guys who've told me they are coming don't show up. So yes, we deal with that a lot. It's a pain in the butt and pisses me off. If you say you're going to do something, do it. If you like to think about doing something but know you'll never actually go through with it, then just keep thinking about it.
GR: Anything else about the business you don't like?
O: Hmmm…I get some really stupid email sometimes!
GR: I had a chance to look over the request section of your site, where your fans can drop you a line and request certain pictures. Most of them were pretty standard stuff, but a few surprised me by being so specific, maybe even a little out of the ordinary. One in particular involved you and a laptop. Does it surprise that some people go to so much trouble to come up with ideas for you?
O: It over joys me when people go to the trouble to come up with original ideas! I've been running the site for almost 10 years now, so the more out of the ordinary stuff is by far the best. I can't tell you how old "I want to see you with a face full of cum" gets when you read it 30 times a day!
GR: What would you like to be able to do, when it's all said and done? Where would you like to be?
O: I'm not really the kind of person who thinks about where she wants to end up. I just enjoy the getting there. I'll get somewhere, sooner or later, and as long as I have fun along the way I'll be happy.
GR: Where do you want the web site to go from here?
O: I'm happy with where it is. Now if I could find a way for it to pull in $10 million a year (or even a million, or ˝ million!), I'd be even happier!
GR: Any regrets?
O: Not a one.
Gabriel Ricard writes short fiction, poetry, and plays. Born in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, he lives with his family in Waverly, Virginia.